NEWS OR PROPAGANDA?...

NEWS OR PROPAGANDA? A writer for Britain's The New Statesman is reporting that the U.S. has completed preparations for an invasion of Iran and that "military operations for a major conventional war with Iran could be implemented any day. They extend far beyond targeting suspect WMD facilities and will enable President Bush to destroy Iran's military, political and economic infrastructure overnight using conventional weapons."

Every single military, CIA, or NGO affiliate I've spoken with in the past six months about Iran tells me that it would a.) be somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible for the U.S. to launch a ground invasion given our present military capabilities and b.) a very bad idea to do so, even if we could. The interesting question to me is where articles like the above are coming from. Who are these anonymous British officers talking to Dan Plesch, a radical left (his term, not mine) security commentator? Who is feeding them their information about American plans? And what is their agenda?

I fear we have entered the moment of propaganda warfare between the U.S. and Iran, where stories like this are designed to telecast power, rather than real plans. Even neoconservative regime change drum-beater Michael Ledeen says he opposes an invasion of Iran, and I know enough about D.C. neoconservative foreign policy thinkers to know that the quickest way to drive them into hysterics is to suggest you think they advocate a conventional military invasion of Iran, rather than targeted military strikes.

Meanwhile, there is a real worry (amongst the people who worry about such things) that an accurate Iranian picture of the current constraints on American power is something that can only further encourage Iranian defiance of the international community and the pursuit of nuclear weaponry. This makes telegraphing an inaccurate picture of American power and intentions a part of the stand-off between the two nations, and means that readers looking for the truth about our own nation's intentions (as well as Iran's) are going to have to be especially skeptical of anonymous reports in the media -- and doubly so when it comes to anonymous leaks in the foreign press about American plans, since those organs do not fall under U.S. prohibitions on using the press to distribute U.S. government propaganda.

--Garance Franke-Ruta

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Garance Franke-Ruta is a former senior editor at the Prospect. Her work has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications.